Zimbabweans get long-awaited deliverance from the evil Mugabe

National Post, 22 November 2017

It remains a black spot on the sainted Mandela’s record that he was indulgent of Mugabe’s continued misrule in neighbouring Zimbabwe

Zimbabweans have earnestly looked forward to Robert Mugabe’s death, that apparently being the only way to be free of his tyrannical regime. Alas, the day of death has been long delayed for the despot.

Last week though, with nonagenarian intuitions of mortality, Mugabe fired his vice-president to make way for his wife, some forty years his junior, to succeed him. The military then quickly stepped in to declare an end to an agonizingly prolonged misadventure in corrupt governance. The generals opted to simply confine him, rather than give Mugabe the Marcos treatment (immediate exile) or the full Ceausescu (summary execution). Tears would not have been shed in either case.

What will follow Mugabe remains to be seen. More than a few times Africans have suffered the sun setting upon one dictator only to rise upon another. But let Zimbabweans take a long awaited moment of satisfaction at the passing from the scene of the last of the African “liberation” leaders who was anything but.